The Sea Change and Other Stories by Helen Grant

It takes a lot of skill to write gothic stories without them sounding ham or predictable. I’ve tried a few and never been satisfied with the way I manage transitions or plant the seeds of doubt. A lot of stories in this genre are a bit too obvious. There’s also a bit of a tendency to stick to the traditions, keep with the old tropes, write in a particular, style, often more or less a pastiche of the old masters of the genre like MR James. There is one such story in Helen Grant’s excellent collection, The Sea Change and Other Stories, but that’s quite intentional, as we shall see.

There are seven stories in The Sea Change, and they are admirably varied in location, subject matter and style. The writing is cool and controlled, drawing the reader into the particular worldview of each story, spinning the central mystery around them and drawing them towards a series of satisfying denouements.

The first story, set in an unidentified German town, revolves around a song which gives the story its title, “Grauer Hans” and features a young girl as a narrator. What she doesn’t understand but somehow intuits, and of course we can see quite clearly, is that she is in some jeopardy, cloistered in her small, upper-floor bedroom with window looking out onto the rooftops of the town. Terror is visited and then revisited. Decidedly eerie.

There is a complete change of style for the second story, the title story of the collection, “The Sea Change”. The author draws on her knowledge of scuba diving for a tale that is truly creepy, with some beautifully (by which I mean horribly) descriptive writing and an ending that is inevitable but still unsettling.

The next story, “The Game of Bear”, is the one I alluded to at the beginning, when I said one story was written in the style of the turn of the early twentieth-century experts in the genre. What I didn’t realise until I’d finished was that this was a prize-winning entry completing an unfinished work by MR James himself. The first 1700 words or so were his, the remainder the author’s. I didn’t see the join. Helen Grant convincingly pulls together the strands of James’s original puzzle in a way that feels completely unforced. An impressive feat.

“Self Catering” is a brief and humorous slice of almost whimsical horror. It’s essentially Mr Benn Goes Horribly Wrong and is tremendous fun.

We shift next to “Nathair Dubh”, a story centred on rock-climbing. The rock in question, of course, has a reputation for strangeness, and an eerie mist that descends on the climbers portends trouble. Trouble duly arrives.

“Alberic de Mauléon” is another MR James-related competition entry, this time to write a sequel to a James story, in this case “Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook”. This is set in the late seventeenth century and there is a very fine sense of place and time here. The inhospitable cold of the time, the life-threatening harshness of the era, is brilliantly conjured and the story’s twist is effectively engineered.

The last story, “The Calvary at Banksá Bystrica”, is probably my favourite, if only because although the mystery is perfectly laid out, it refuses to reveal itself totally. It is set in Slovakia and is based on a real place which the author visited and which she renders in vivid detail. Some of the descriptive writing in this story is truly excellent, creepy beyond measure but finely controlled.

This is a highly recommended collection, published in a good quality paperback edition by The Swan River Press. Seek it out. It’s worth it. 

Too Near The Dead by Helen Grant

For much of the 2000s and 2010s I read pretty much exclusively American literature, that being my PhD subject. Since then, I’ve been returning to our own British literature and at the moment I’m in a particularly Scottish phase. Therefore, when I discovered it’s set in Crieff, my home town, I couldn’t not read Helen Grant’s Too Near The Dead.

Helen describes the book as Perthshire Gothic, which sounds just fine to me. I read a lot of gothic/horror at one time, people like Joe Donnelly and Peter James before he started his crime series, and I always admired the skill involved in being able to manage the tension of describing a series of uncanny events. How do you keep it feeling real?

I suspect that’s something Helen has thought about, too. In a recent interview, she said:

All my books have a lot of gothic elements in them. Folklore, abandoned places, stuff like that. They do have ghostly stuff too but, up until I wrote Too Near The Dead, most of my books had what one reader called a ‘Scooby Doo ending’ – it would turn out that whatever apparently supernatural stuff was going on was actually being carried out by a serial killer.

It’s not a spoiler to say that this is not the case in Too Near The Dead.

Fen Munro and her fiance James have bought a house on the outskirts of an unnamed town – based on Crieff – and are planning their wedding. The house is new, but it is built on the site of an old, now demolished building. Gradually – and this really is where the skill of gothic writers comes to the fore – things begin to happen which are at first odd, then mildly frightening, then utterly terrifying. Helen Grant paces this brilliantly. She weaves into the present-day narrative memories of Fen’s past and her troubled relationship with her ultra-strict parents and this will come to have a significance at the end. She has terrifying dreams, dreams which seem utterly real, to the extent she wakes up in a downstairs room. Was she sleepwalking? Or something else?

The tension is ratcheted up throughout. There is a malevolence about the setting in which the story takes place – the house, the countryside in which it sits, the dead who may still be lurking there – which forces you to see things through Fen’s fearful eyes. Helen is right about those ‘Scooby Doo’ moments in many books of this genre. So often, a brilliant set-up is spoiled by its ending, by an attempt to rationalise what the author has spent the entire book trying to persuade us is irrational, or uncanny, or perhaps evil. It feels like a cheat.

The ending of Too Near The Dead does not seek to explain. And it is all the better for that.

This is a tremendous book, exciting and gripping. It pulls you in from page one and doesn’t let go.

And it even describes my two favourite libraries, the AK Bell in Perth and the Strathearn Campus in Crieff. I’ve spent plenty time myself in those libraries doing research. Not, I’m glad to say for the desperate reasons that Fen has to in this novel. Too Near The Dead is definitely worth reading.